


it's still raining

by daughterofrohan



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/M, also i made myself cry oops, i took some creative liberties with aou canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-23
Updated: 2015-04-23
Packaged: 2018-03-25 08:56:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3804445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daughterofrohan/pseuds/daughterofrohan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He doesn’t need to ask her what the rain reminds her of. A thousand cities, a thousand places, a thousand missions, and one constant; each other. He wonders how they got it so wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it's still raining

**Author's Note:**

> ignore me, i'm garbage

It’s raining when they meet, water falling hard and fast from the sky as she leans against the wall in a dimly-lit alley, her dress in tatters, makeup smeared underneath her eyes. The water plasters her hair to her face as she sits in a pool of her own blood, hands pressed to her side in an effort to delay her inevitable death.

The cold rain bites at his face as he drops from the roof, landing catlike in front of her. She looks up at him, lips slightly parted, a mixture of fear and surprise in her eyes, and he forgets all of his orders because the girl looking at him isn’t a killer. He takes a step closer, holding up his hand to show that he has no weapons, and her eyes burn into him. She closes her eyes as he kneels beside her, letting her head fall back against the damp wall. She feels gentle hands replace her own on her side, putting pressure on her wound, and her eyes flutter open again in surprise.

The look that passes between them is an unspoken understanding, one that will be behind every word and every touch and every look. _I’ll take care of you_.

 ***

It’s still raining later, when she wakes up in his hotel room with a bandage covering a line of neat, systematic stitches on her side, a much better and more thorough first aid job than she’s ever done on herself. She looks out the window and imagines the water wiping away her blood left smeared on the narrow streets between the tall buildings, imagines the water washing away the metaphorical blood on her hands, imagines the water washing away her old life.

When he sits on the edge of the bed, a respectful distance away from her, and asks her, “Are you a bad person, Natasha?” she tells him, “I don’t have to be.”

 ***

It’s raining the day they finally trust her enough to issue her a SHIELD ID and let her leave base for the first time in a month. He still insists on taking her on a tour of the city, insisting that having seen it before on a mission isn’t good enough. They walk the streets together, looking for a suitable apartment so she doesn’t have to live on base with the junior agents.

(It’s sunny the day she moves in. He helps her carry her mismatched furniture up to the third floor of her building and buys her a coffee maker as a housewarming gift because he refuses to believe that she can function without one even though she’s told him multiple times that not everyone equates caffeine to air in terms of need.)

 ***

It’s raining when she shows up at his apartment at 2am, haunted by a nightmare she can’t seem to shake even in waking. She wraps her arms around herself in a way that makes her look so small and helpless that it’s like twisting a knife into his heart.

He wraps an arm around her shoulders as they sit side by side on the couch and when she speaks, it’s to tell him stories of blood and torture and death and the red in her ledger that will never wash out. He listens because he knows what it’s costing her to tell him about her past. And when he speaks it’s about pain and broken homes and a childhood he wishes he could forget. And as the rain falls outside she rests her head on his shoulder and they fall silent because everything’s already been said.

The sun is shining when he wakes her up in the morning and ever so briefly, she forgets her nightmares existed.

 ***

They stumble into the hotel room after the shitstorm in Budapest, bruised and bleeding and exhausted. He’s expecting their post-mission ritual of patching each other up, but instead her lips are on his the second the door closes.

“Natasha,” he breathes as his hands come to rest lightly on her hips. “You know we can’t go back from this.”

She kisses him again with the fierce, burning intensity that he’s come to expect from her. “I know.”

Later, when they’re tangled together in bed, she lifts herself up on her elbows to look over him at the water streaming down the window, distorting the harsh city lights into something that’s almost beautiful.

“Nat?” he reaches up, fiddling idly with a strand of her hair.

Her voice is soft, private, gentle in a way he never knew she could be. “It’s raining.”

“I know.” He pulls her close, trailing his fingers down her spine. “Haven’t you noticed? Everything important in our lives always happens when it’s raining.”

 ***

She hates the way he looks in the hospital bed, the bandages covering his ears, ears the doctors said will never recover from the trauma he suffered. Hearing aids, they told her, will help him get back most of what he’s lost. He’ll be able to function almost normally again, they said. She wants to scream at them that not a single one of them in this whole damn organization is normal, wants to ask them who the fuck gave them the authority to define “normal”. Instead, she sits calmly beside his bed in the uncomfortable plastic chair and asks, “How long until he wakes up?”

His eyes open thirty-seven minutes later and immediately search for hers.

_“It’s raining,”_ she signs, the motions painstakingly slow because it’s been so long since she’s needed to practice her sign language.

_“I can’t hear it,”_ he tells her.

_“I know.”_ She stands, moving around his bed to pull back the curtain and reveal the rain-spattered windowpane. _“But you can see it.”_

_***_

There’s so much blood. She’s lying far too still in a pool of red that’s steadily growing. He shouts for evac, for backup, for _anything_ , not caring if he jeopardizes the mission because what does the mission mean when his partner’s bleeding out in front of him? If SHIELD responds, he doesn’t hear them. He doesn’t hear anything, but he _feels_. He feels the rain rolling off his skin and the desperate panic deep in his gut, the need to see the rise and fall of her chest so he knows she’s still breathing.

He rips his jacket off as he reaches her, pressing it down over her stomach to cover the bleeding. Her eyes flutter open as she feels the pressure. “Clint.” It’s barely a whisper, her voice weaker than he’s ever heard it. He tries not to think about what that means.

“Don’t talk. Eyes on me.”

It takes all the energy she has left to raise her hand and sign something that looks like _goodbye_. Tears leave his eyes then, mingling with the raindrops on his face until he can’t tell the difference anymore. She takes a shallow, shuddering breath. “It’s raining,” she whispers, and then her eyes flutter shut again.

“No!” he screams at his unconscious partner, fingers desperately searching her neck for a pulse. “This isn’t how it works, Nat. Don’t fucking leave me. Don’t you dare.”

SHIELD pulls him away from her when they arrive and the next time he sees her is in a hospital bed, looking impossibly small, hooked up to a dozen monitors with a machine beating instead of her heart. “It’s raining,” he tells her, because they said that sometimes people in a coma can hear you. Bullshit, he thinks, until her hand twitches on top of the covers and he spends the next seventeen hours until she wakes up keeping vigil at her side, her hand held tightly in his.

“How are you feeling?” he asks her, knowing it’s a stupid question, still needing her to answer because he has to hear her voice.

“It was raining,” she says quietly. “That’s all I remember.”

He stretches out next to her on the narrow hospital bed, careful not to jostle any of the wires she’s still hooked up to. His lips ghost across her temple and she can feel the warmth of his breath. “Never do that again.”

“No promises.”

 ***

She gives him two weeks after New York. Two weeks to wallow in self-pity before SHIELD starts asking questions and she’s finally had enough and she shows up at his door one night as the sky is turning grey and threatening to storm, letting herself in with the spare key she’s had for as long as she can remember.

He looks up at her with bloodshot eyes as the door swings shut and she lets her gaze sweep over his apartment, taking in the disaster. The floor is littered with empty bottles and pizza boxes. The dark circles under his eyes give away everything she already knows; he hasn’t been taking care of himself.

He sighs deeply as she makes her way towards the couch. “You can tell whoever sent you that I’m not coming back. It’s over.”

“Nobody sent me.” She holds out her hand. He stares at her quizzically until he realizes that she isn’t going to elaborate and takes her hand, lacing his fingers through hers in a way that feels like a distant memory, and yet achingly familiar.

She leads him to the roof as the first strike of lightning flashes across the sky and the rain begins to fall. He tilts his face up towards the sky and lets the raindrops roll off of his cheeks like tears. She touches his arm lightly and he pulls her into his arms, rough and needy, whispering her name into her hair over and over and over. The rain soaks them to the bone and they finally retreat back inside once they begin to shiver from the cold.

She sinks down next to him on the couch wearing one of his old hoodies, hands him a steaming mug of coffee. He runs a hand absently through her hair, still damp from the rain. “Fury didn’t send you. Hill didn’t send you. Why’d you come here, Nat?”

She catches his hand, holding it to her cheek, leaning into the contact because she needs it, craves it like a drug. “We take care of each other, Clint. Other things might end, but that doesn’t.”

 ***

She walks quickly through the streets of Berlin, hood pulled up over her head to protect her hair from the light drizzle. She doesn’t see the old man at first, almost running him over in her haste. “Sorry,” she mutters, looking up to apologize. And then she stops.

The stall she’s standing in front of is full of jewellery. Most of it is too gaudy and conspicuous for her liking, but something catches her eye.

The old man follows her gaze. “See anything you like, sweetheart?”

She points to the small silver arrow. “That one.”

 ***

He’s waiting for her in Salt Lake City when she gets off the plane, her hair pulled back under a baseball cap so she doesn’t stand out in the crowd now that everyone knows her face, knows her name, knows what she’s done. He’s not one for emotional airport greetings, he never has been, but he kisses her softly because it’s been too long and he can see the pain and emotional turmoil in her eyes, hidden from everyone but him.

She doesn’t ask him where he’s been and he doesn’t tell her and it feels a bit like betrayal. He tells himself that he wouldn’t keep the truth from her if she asked. She tells herself that there are some truths she doesn’t want to know yet.

The cabin in the mountains becomes a refuge. They dance around each other at first, almost as if they don’t know how to pick up where they left off. For so long they’ve let SHIELD define them and their relationship. They were partners because they had to be, because they worked together, because anything else was too complicated and too permanent. Now that SHIELD’s gone and they’re really, truly on their own, they don’t know what they are.

They finally fall back together one night, when she’s in the midst of a nightmare and her screams are so loud that he can hear them through two closed doors as he stares out the window at the clouds that threaten to break open.

“Natasha.” His voice is heartbreakingly gentle as he shakes her awake. “Natasha it’s okay. You’re okay.”

“Clint?”

“It was just a nightmare, Nat.”

She sinks back into the bed, sighing heavily as she tries to detangle herself from the covers. “Okay.”

“Okay,” he agrees. The silence is palpable as she averts her gaze from his, looking down at her hands. He turns to leave.

“Clint, wait.”

He turns to find her looking at him nervously, hesitantly. She looks so young and scared and vulnerable and he can’t believe he was about to leave her like this after shaking her out of her nightmare.

“Stay? Please.” It’s a tentative whisper, something she needs but knows she’s not allowed to ask for.

He lies down beside her, his thumb massaging gentle circles on her side. “Try to sleep, Nat. You need rest.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t want to close my eyes again.”

“What do you need?”

She leans in, pressing her lips to his and _God_ , he’s missed her. “A distraction.”

When she kisses him again it’s rough and needy and he loses himself in the feeling of her, a feeling he might never understand but craves all the same.

“Is it raining?” she asks him after, pulling on his discarded shirt.

He wraps an arm around her waist, pulling her close to him as lightning briefly illuminates the room, followed by a distant clap of thunder. “Yeah,” he whispers, pressing his lips to her temple. “It’s raining.”

 ***

She can’t sleep. It might have something to do with the gash across her ribs that she stitched up sloppily after the battle. It might have something to do with the fact that she’s in an unfamiliar house, _his_ unfamiliar house. It might have something to do with the unfamiliar woman and children in the rooms next door. It might have something to do with the fact that after all the years of partnership and trust and _you’re my best friend_ , he’d never mentioned a home and a family. Betrayal is a knife whose wounds she doesn’t think she can stitch up on her own.

The bedroom feels too small. The house feels too small. She thinks the whole world might feel too small. Slipping through the door, she walks silently across the living room, freezing when she sees a silhouette by the window that she’d recognize anywhere.

He senses her presence behind him before he hears her. He feels an almost sick sense of pleasure knowing that she can’t sleep either, that he’s not the only one being torn apart on the inside. “It’s still raining,” he says. _I still love you_ , he thinks. He regrets never telling her before, because now she might not ever know.

“I hate you.”

“I know. I deserve it.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she whispers, her voice breaking.

“Why not?”

“I heard the rain.”

When he turns to look at her, her eyes are shining with tears. He doesn’t need to ask her what the rain reminds her of. A thousand cities, a thousand places, a thousand missions, and one constant; each other. He wonders how they got it so wrong. She sits on the couch next to him and leans her head against his shoulder, letting the tears leak from her eyes and roll down her cheeks, reflecting the moonlight that streams through the window.

“Love is for children,” he tells her softly, wrapping an arm around her waist.

“I never believed that,” she says. “I told you what you wanted to hear. I wanted you to be happy.”

“Natasha. Did you really think I could be happy when you weren’t?”

She shakes her head, her hair tickling the bottom of his chin. “I don’t know what I thought. It doesn’t matter now.”

“Yes it does, Natasha. It still matters. It always mattered.”

“Why, Clint? Why can’t you just forget me and live the life you deserve?”

“Because it’s still raining.” He whispers the words into her hair like a secret. _I still love you_.

She looks up at the water streaming down the windowpane before tilting her head to look at him, the corner of her mouth quirking up in a smile that’s small and sad, but genuine. “Yeah. It’s still raining.”

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi on [tumblr](http://natrasharomanova.tumblr.com)!


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